Sign and Note and Character
by Allekha
Summary: At some point after Nate started to visit the Institute regularly, they took an interest in Nick. (M!SS/Nick)


A/N: Written for neverminetohold for fandom5k.

Slightly AU on Nate's background. Contains very vague spoilers for something from early Far Harbor.

* * *

When a loud crash of thunder shook the skies above Sanctuary with nary a cloud in sight, Nick immediately dropped the screwdriver he was holding, scrambled off the roof where he'd been working, and sprinted down what remained of the asphalt.

He was the second to arrive, ahead of even Codsworth, and was only second because Sturges had stationed himself next to the teleporter, making sure that nothing happened to it while they waited.

It had been _days_. Almost a week. As busy as Nick had been keeping himself helping out around Sanctuary – lending a hand with repairs, patrolling the edges with Garvey at night, assisting Codsworth in cleaning out the old houses, telling stories about interesting cases when people gathered for dinner – he always seemed to have a few spare processor cycles for worrying about Nate.

He had seen what the Institute did to people, even if he couldn't remember what they had done to him. There was one case in particular that he hadn't been able to stop going over in his head these past few days: a desperate couple, traders, had shown up and begged him to find their wayward son, who they'd lost track of when running from a fight between two groups of Raiders. Nick had eventually found the kid – it took weeks, but he tracked him down to a tiny farm that had picked him up – and returned him to his mothers none the worse for wear, chubby cheeks and all.

A few years on, one mom came back to the agency, looked at him with tired eyes, and asked him if there was any way to tell a synth apart from a human. The kid hadn't aged a day, and the doctors they'd taken him to couldn't find anything wrong with him.

Nick had no idea what had happened to them after that; they'd left Diamond City, synth-kid in tow, and he'd never heard from any of them ever again. No idea what had happened to the original kid. No idea what the Institute had even been trying to accomplish with that trick, either.

They'd get a lot more out of replacing someone like Nate, Nick had been thinking this whole week, and if he didn't have a stomach that could turn any longer, it sure as hell felt like he did.

As the bright flash of lightning started to fade, Nick forced himself to set that particular worry aside, though he couldn't help but give Nate's figure a good run-down as he stood there, blinking furiously. Nate looked a bit dazed, maybe a shade paler than before he'd left – hard to tell in the dim twilight – and after a moment, he started to sway like he'd lost his balance.

"Whoa there," said Nick, ducking under a wire and catching him by the shoulder. "You okay there?"

"Fine," Nate said, shaking his head slightly. "Just... ugh, that thing feels horrible."

It was about this point that the rest of Sanctuary burst into the old backyard where they had built the teleporter. Codsworth's ecstatic "Sir!" overlapped with Garvey's "General!" and a whole chorus of exclamations from the other settlers and allies arriving on the scene.

"Hold on, hold on," Garvey shouted, and the others quieted. Nick more felt Nate sighing than heard it, and Nate reached up to rub at his face. From closer up, he looked exhausted, though not otherwise harmed. "Let's give him a minute before we start rushing him for the secrets of the Institute, okay? Everyone, back to whatever you were doing."

While the settlers grumbled or shouted well-wishes and left, Codsworth swooped forward. "Sir, are you unharmed?"

Nate managed a weak smile. "Yeah, I'm good. Thanks for asking."

"Thank goodness! And... the young Shaun...?"

The smile vanished. Nick let go of his shoulder now that he seemed to be steady on his feet, and gave it a sympathetic pat before he stepped back. "He's..." He let out a shuddery sigh. "Oh my god, where do I even start."

"I hear the beginning's a good place," said Garvey. "If you're up for it right now. But if it's not an emergency, I hear we're supposed to have fresh vegetables with dinner tonight."

Nate nodded, his eyes distant. "Yeah, um. Dinner sounds good."

Dinner was the kind of mushy soup made from anything that could be thrown together into a pot, thickened with grain, with the promised vegetables floating in large chunks. It wasn't anything special, really, but for wasteland food outside of a major settlement like Diamond City, it smelled _amazing_. Nick even got a tiny portion, just enough for a taste, not enough to clog up his system.

Nate brightened up just a bit on receiving his bowl, and he managed to get about half of it down before he got roped into talking about the Institute. He went on and on about this amazing place he'd found – gleaming white floors, green grass and trees, advanced medical technology, computers everywhere – interspersed with a few complaints – like how the primary food was literally _paste,_ despite their agriculture research,which explained his enthusiasm for the food.

"But if it's so amazing down there," wondered their newest settler, a woman who had become the best thing to a doctor here by dint of having more nursing experience than anyone but Nate, "why don't they ever come trade any of it up here? Gotta be supplies or something they need."

"That's the thing," said Nate, his frown deepening. "I don't know that any of them have ever come up to the surface. They send synths under Institute control and... that's most of it, I think. They think everything up here is a living hell, a threat to their promise of a future for humanity, and they don't see any worth in it."

This provoked a round of groans and shaken heads. " _That_ doesn't sound very scientific to me," the woman complained. "Collect biased and faulty data, then just give up on doing anything? Do they want to live underground forever?"

"See, the thing is – it gets worse – they _can't_ stay underground forever. They're straining on their own resources. I heard some rumors about some kind of new power source they're trying to build, fusion or something. I dunno, it sounded like the same pipe dreams that were always twenty years away pre-War. Anyway, they're running out of resources down there. I saw a lot of memos about conserving energy, which it turns out they're already stealing from settlements up here."

Garvey set his bowl down with a heavy _clunk_. "Stealing from... they're siphoning off our power?"

Nate nodded. "Might want to let the rest of the Minutemen know so everyone can double-check that their lines aren't being tapped, though I think Diamond City and the other big places are probably losing the most."

"So they hate us, they're kidnapping people, and they're stealing from us," the woman muttered. " _Great_. I don't suppose whatever you were looking for makes up for it?"

"Well, they _did_ give me some medical supplies..."

Her eyes lit up when Nate hauled one of his bags out from the corner and passed it over for her to have a look. Nick peered over her shoulder and saw at least a dozen Stimpacks, bottles of medication, a pack of new and shiny scalpels, and what looked like other medical supplies whose uses he couldn't quite guess at. She immediately took off to restock their tiny clinic. Nate had other presents, too – a few seeds for their garden plots that were supposed to produce more nutritious food that Curie took with eager hands, a holotape for Sturges full of intel, even a few books in reasonably good condition for the tiny Sanctuary library.

It was a far smaller group that gathered after dinner in Nate's house. Nate took the arm chair by the window, tapping his foot against the braided rug (a project by one of the other settlers to make Sanctuary more homey). Garvey sat heavily on the facing couch, while Curie was settled next to him on the very edge, her eyes bright and curious. Ada, who was usually down in Starlight Drive-In nowadays, working on repairing the old place, had come up a few days ago and was now standing in a corner. Nick half-perched on the arm of the chair, and Codsworth bustled happily about offering everyone hot drinks. (There was no coffee, alas, but people had gotten pretty inventive about making tea from almost any other plant in the Commonwealth.)

Nate cleared his throat. "So. Shaun." His voice was rough, and he coughed again. "Well, first thing first, he's alive."

Curie clapped her hands as Codsworth exclaimed, "Thank goodness!"

Nick couldn't let himself slump in relief, though, not with the look on Nate's face. "And what's the bad news?" he asked, using the gentle voice he usually broke out with scared or frantic clients.

"Bad news. Right. Bad news... Nick, remember how we thought that Shaun was taken, what, maybe ten years ago? Turns out we were completely off. It's more like sixty."

So not only was he no longer a baby, he wasn't even a kid anymore. He was more than twice as old as his own uncle. Damn.

"That's a lot of missed time," said Garvey.

"One more thing." Nate took a deep breath. "So, uh. Turns out he's been raised by the Institute this whole time, so he's in good shape, for the most part. He was even happy to see me, I think. But also. He's their director."

Nick sucked in a breath through his teeth. Curie made a soft, "Oh."

"Their director?" Garvey raised both eyebrows and sat back. "Hell. No wonder you came in looking messed up, General."

"The young Shaun is... oh, dear. Well, at least he has his mother's intelligence."

"You said he was happy to see you, and it sounds like they were pretty welcoming toward you, if they let you have all those supplies. Do you think he'd be willing to listen to reason if it comes from you? Actually help out the Commonwealth instead of just stealing its resources?"

"I don't know," Nate sighed, rubbing his face. "I tried to talk with him, but I didn't have as much time for that as I would have liked. He was in meetings all day, that kind of stuff. Herding cats."

They talked for a little while longer, Nate telling them details that he'd left out before, the rest of them trading ideas. It was late, though, and they called the meeting to an end for the night when it was obvious both of the humans were tired. Curie left in the direction of the miniature lab she'd set up as Garvey went off to his own bed. Codsworth began tidying the room. "Let me know if I can be of any help," said Ada.

"Thanks. I will."

She paused, tilted her head just slightly. "Please get plenty of rest. As my companions liked to say, things seem better in the morning."

"I will," Nate said again, mustering a smile for her. It dropped as soon as she was out of the room, and he slumped forward in his chair.

Nick gave him a couple of minutes before nudging him in the shoulder. "Might want to take her up on that advice," he said. "You've been through a lot these past few days."

"Yeah," Nate said, several seconds past the point of awkward silence. "I dunno if I can fall asleep yet."

"Give it a try," said Nick, nudging him again. Nate had looked absolutely exhausted for the past couple of hours; he'd probably be under in a couple of minutes once he was in bed. "Come on."

At that, Nate finally stood. He gave a little wave as Codsworth wished him a good-night and turned the newly-installed lights off as Nate disappeared into the hallway. Nick spotted his backpack by the door – he'd dropped it there when he came in and probably forgot about it. No use leaving it there for him to trip over in the morning; Nick picked it up and took it down the hall for him.

Nate was on the bed – progress – but still fully-dressed and on top of the covers. He was staring at the ceiling and didn't look up as Nick set the backpack down next to the beat-up desk Nate had hauled in here.

"It's been a while since I needed to use one of those, but I think you're supposed to put the blankets on top of you when it's this cold out."

Nate snorted and moved one arm slightly so he could turn his head and look at Nick. "You don't use that one in your office?"

"Well, once in a while." When he needed to run a more in-depth diagnostic or maintenance routine, or pass some time on a quiet night, it was nice to have a lie-down. He could even shut off some of his higher cognitive functions for a while, though it wasn't anything like real sleep. "Mostly it's for decoration."

Nate shook his head and sat up, then started to peel off the armor strapped around his limbs. "Hey, Nick," he said as he wrestled with one of the straps. "Could I ask a favor?"

"Sure, whatever you need."

"Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I wanted to... could you help me..." He sighed. "I think it's time to clear out the nursery."

"Is that all? Of course." As far as Nick knew, it hadn't been touched since Nate came out of the vault. A crib waiting for a baby that would never sleep there, toys that Shaun would never play with.

There was a quiet clanging noise as the armor hit the floor. Nate nudged it out of the way with his foot and moved on to his other arm. "There have to be some kids who could use the toys, I guess. Dunno about the crib. We could use it for firewood, if nothing else. Just. Before, whenever I looked in there, it kind of gave me hope that I'd find Shaun someday. Now, it... god. Director of the Institute."

"You sound pretty shaken up about it," said Nick, sitting down next to him on the bed. "Nobody was expecting that."

"Here I was thinking they'd done awful things to him, locked him up or worse, and. On the one hand, it sounds like he was raised pretty happily. On the other, _Director of the Institute_. I tried to talk with him, you know," he said, his voice going up, the pace of his speech speeding in a way that made Nick uneasy. "He just, I think he humored me but didn't believe me at all. When I said that things aren't all bad up here, and I should be the one to know, right? When I said there were good people. When I asked why they were keeping everything to themselves. When I asked about the synths. It's not like there weren't _any_ voices of dissent in there, but they were so afraid to talk about it."

"Hey," Nick said softly, but Nate barreled on.

"And it's not like they were just – oh my god, Nick, they had this project with synthetic _gorillas_. There was some guy trying to talk about synthetic dolphins because hey, they had land robots, why not sea robots? Though at least it sounded like he wasn't getting anything for it. Nick, they made the super mutants and then just _let them out_ to see what would happen, like, they could have put them down but they just made things worse for everyone."

Nick tried again, more firmly. "Hey, Nate."

"But at the same time they were so _nice_ to me, let me poke around almost everywhere. There was even this one guy, his wife was a synth, his kid obviously loved her, but all the others were basically slaves. I don't understand – they make no sense down there, Nick, and they hate the wasteland so much but they won't stop screwing around with it, hey, did you know, the mayor of Diamond City really is a synth, I found the terminal entry for him–"

" _Nate_." Nick wrapped his good hand around one of Nate's where it had been fumbling with the armor fastenings for the past couple of minutes now to no avail. "Nate. Ada's right. You gotta get some rest, and then you can worry about all of this in the morning. Fill us in on the rest, figure out what you have to figure out."

"Right," said Nate. His voice had gone quiet again. Nick slowly released his hand, and after a couple of moments it went back to undoing the armor, this time with better results. "Morning."

Nate finally got the armor off and crawled under the covers. "You need anything else?" Nick asked. "Or should I let you get your beauty sleep in peace?"

"Could you, um. If you don't mind, would you mind staying a few more minutes? Just till I fall asleep? In case my brain starts doing the thing where it won't shut up again."

"Of course."

He hoped Nate would fall asleep quickly, but not even five minutes in and he started to fidget under the blankets.

"Was there anything else you wanted to get off your chest?"

"Mm." Nate turned from his side to his back, and then back to his side. "Do you think... do you think it might be worth going back? Keeping in touch with Shaun, trying to change their minds? Do you think they can change at all?"

"That's a tough one." Nick shifted a bit to face Nate better and laced his hands on one knee. "You know him better than I do, but if I had to guess... it's been, what, you said sixty years? That's a long time to live under a way of thinking. Even if you are his uncle, he might not listen at all. Is it worth trying? Well, that's up to you. If nothing else, there's got to be a lot of data down there that could come in handy, help stop their worse ideas."

Nate was silent for long enough that Nick started to think he'd actually begun to fall asleep, but then came the words, small: "Thanks, Nick."

"Anytime."

"And – I swear, this is the last thing and then I'll shut up and go to sleep – sorry."

"What for?"

"I couldn't find anything on you. I looked, when I got on their computers. Didn't get to try all of them, but there was nothing about you. Didn't want to risk asking around."

"That's probably for the best. Don't kick yourself about it. Weren't you the one giving me all those inspiring speeches about how I'm my very own person now?"

"Yeah." At the limits of his low-light vision in the dark room, Nick could just see the corners of his mouth turn up into a brief smile. "Night."

And with that, _finally_ , he settled down, and was soon breathing deep and slow. Even then, though, with nothing very pressing to do, Nick sat at Nate's desk, listening to the soft sound of breathing. This was a lot for the rest of them to take in, too, and he had a whole sleepless night ahead of him to think it over.

~!~

Nick helped him take apart the nursery in the morning – they ended up dragging the crib into another house that had been turned into a storage space, taking the rug to another settler's shack, and giving the toys to a passing trader who Nick remembered had a couple of kids at home. There was a book, too, the kind with bright colors and large text, that quietly disappeared; Nick didn't ask where it had gone. Nate was silent when they were finished, and stood for a couple of minutes in the now-empty room.

"Guess I could bring the desk in here or something," he said. "Put in a cupboard for all these damn holotapes I keep picking up. Or put up a map of the settlements. Preston could use one of those."

His voice was even, calm, but his shoulders still held all the tension of last night.

"You doing okay?"

Nate nodded and didn't quite meet Nick's eyes. "I decided that I'll just do my best with Shaun," he said. "If I can get him to see that there's good things up here, great; if not, well, I can tell my sister-in-law I tried next time I take her flowers. Maybe help them out a bit – not with getting escaped synths back in there, but, like, little things. Find out whatever info can help the Railroad and the Minutemen. I don't – maybe it won't work. But at least I'll try."

"That's all any of us can do. I hope it works out."

From then on, Nate rarely talked about Shaun, though he would occasionally mention something he had picked up from the Institute or the like when Nick was tagging along with him. He showed up at the agency one day with a shiny new plasma rifle – he let Nick have a turn with it when they traversed the edge of the swamp, where he took down the overgrown mosquitos along their path with _way_ too much firepower. "What do you think?" Nate asked, grinning. He was holding his older laser rifle, which he'd told Nick to have, but it was lowered; he was letting Nick have all the fun.

"Hell of a kick. You sure this is Institute tech? Usually their weapons are _less_ powerful than what we get up here. Too many people looking for ways to kill each other."

"I think they said it was an experiment? Anyway, I modded it a bit, too. Took down the recoil, added some ammo capacity, tuned it better. Added a decent sniper scope."

"All by yourself? I thought it was your brother that was in the military." Nick didn't sense anything else near them, so he took a moment to look over the weapon – now that he was inspecting it, he could see where Nate had changed it, the places where the neat lines of Institute technology were interrupted, where the gleaming white paint had gotten scraped off a bit.

"And I was the one that stayed up late building radios and messing with my computer. It's not that different, really."

"He's a nurse _and_ he can patch together electronics. You gonna take synth repairs up anytime soon?"

"Ha. Maybe if I stick around in the synth labs long enough, I could learn how to manage. You should probably stick to Dr. Amari, though."

"I'd rather have you then nothing, at least." Faintly, on the edge of his hearing, he heard the softest of whines. He hefted the rifle up again, found the source of the sound, and took the bloodbug out from a very far distance. "Speaking of the Institute, how are things going with them?"

It was a while before Nate spoke. "Okay. It's... there's a couple of scientists who actually seem interested in what I have to say. Most of the rest, it's like they see me like a test subject or something. Oh, hey, the man from the surface said something cute about the Minutemen, make sure to smile at him but then move on. And Shaun... I don't know. It's hard to tell if I'm getting through to him at all." They were coming out the swamp now and onto one of the cracking pre-War roads, so they switched weapons again. "Last time," Nate said abruptly, then stopped.

Nick gave him a couple of minutes to catch his train of thought. "Last time?" he prompted when Nate said nothing more.

"Last time, he asked me about his parents. We sat down in the grass for an hour and I just told him stories, about how my brother met Nora, about the time at the Christmas party he tripped and spilled eggnog all over her nice dress – thankfully it all came out at the dry cleaner's, and of course he paid for it, and our sister lent her something else for the evening, and in the end she wasn't even mad – and how she always recorded holotapes to send him, and how she helped me put together Codsworth even though she didn't know anything about electronics. Stuff like that. And he seemed so interested. For a moment, I thought... but then, before I left. He told me a synth had just escaped, if I knew the terrain around Salem well enough to check it out. Told him my journalist friend was calling in a favor, so sorry, gotta go."

It wasn't even a lie. Piper had hijacked one of the advertising spots on Diamond City Radio to ask Nate to come and help her out with an investigation. The two of them had up and vanished for a week, and in the few days since they had come back, there hadn't been anything noteworthy in the paper. A lead that went cold, maybe, or something they were waiting on. "Sorry to hear about that, Nate."

"Yeah, um. I passed it on the Railroad on my way back, so. But there's one more thing. Nick, I – I swear I haven't mentioned you to anyone there. But one of the scientists, not one of the ones who seem to realize that synths are sentient beings too, he came up to me and said that he'd heard about the 'prototype model playing at detective' – sorry – 'that you've been running around with' and asked me if I could take you there so he could have a look at your insides. I said no. I mean, of course I said no. But be careful, okay? I don't want to wake up one day to hear you've disappeared."

"Of course I will. I've managed this long, haven't I?" As if to help him demonstrate, a Yao Guai wandered onto the road, far ahead, just barely visible through the fog; Nick got the first shot at it, though Nate was the one who brought it down with his overcharged plasma rifle. His aim was getting better, Nick noted. The first time Nick had seen him in a fight, he'd been a terrible shot, better suited for folding himself in a corner until the people he was fighting gave up on finding him. (Alas, the wildlife did not give up so easily.) "Don't know what they want with me now, anyway. Do they think their ancestors missed something that could make me useful to them? Or maybe they just need the spare parts."

"I don't really want to think about it," Nate said. "It can't be anything good. Just don't get caught by a Courser, okay?"

"I think they have higher-priority targets," said Nick, but when that didn't smooth Nate's pinched face, he added in a softer voice, "I'll keep an eye out. They're not going to take me back that easy."

"Okay," Nate said, quiet. "Sure."

Something in the tone of his voice made Nick worry. "I mean it," he said, more forcefully. "I don't want them rummaging around up here any more than you do, and I've got a hell of a lot of experience keeping myself together out here."

"I believe you."

They turned quiet after that; they were going south-west, not the friendliest part of the Commonwealth, in search of a settlement that had dropped out of radio contact a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully, the weather was fair and the wildlife seemed to be pursuing prey elsewhere today. They made excellent time on the old roads and were at their destination by early afternoon.

Nick hung back while Nate talked with the two people who seemed to live here – no use in creeping out a couple of strangers – and while he idly scanned for signs of danger, he couldn't help but continue to turn over what Nate had said earlier. Why _did_ the Institute want him back all of a sudden? Revisiting an old experiment? Maybe the fact that he'd been thrown out was part of an experiment itself, something he'd considered before. Let's see how the confused synth navigates the wasteland. One was a tiny sample size, but for all he knew there had been others that didn't make it.

"Hey, Nick. They said their radio's down and they don't know how to fix it. Want to come help?"

"Sure, why not."

Mostly that meant handing Nate tools as he took the thing apart, spotted the faulty component, swapped it out, and put it back together. Less than thirty minutes, and a few of those were spent looking for a screw that accidentally got knocked off the table when neither of them had the good sense to put it in a glass. It sure was a wonder watching Nate's fingers at work, the way his eyes lit up as they darted over the insides of the radio.

The settlers offered to let them stay the night, but there was plenty of daylight left. Nate didn't have any pressing tasks, but he did have a couple of things he wanted to do between here and Sanctuary, so they turned northwards and followed the road back up. It shouldn't have been that long of a trip.

This was Nate, though, so of course it took them four times as long to travel the distance as it would have anyone else. The man had a knack for stumbling into trouble or sob-stories, and with the latter he was just as much a softy as Nick was at heart. In the course of going to Sanctuary, they: took out two groups of Raiders and a nest of Gunners, took a lost Protectron back to its library, picked a whole bunch of fern leaves (Curie was doing a study, apparently, on whether a compound in them could be medicinal), took a detour to Graygarden to say hello to the Mister Handys there, and rescued a little boy's cat from a tree.

(That last one really got Nick's coolant pumping, as Nate was the one who volunteered to climb the tree first, and it was one of those sickly, thin things that had lived through too many rad storms. Each small breeze sent the branches swaying, leaving both Nate and the kitten to hold on to dear life lest they fall. Nick tracked him from beneath the whole time he was up there, terrified he would fall and break his neck. This did not happen, and both man and kitten came down safely.)

They stopped at Starlight Drive-In the afternoon they finally reached Sanctuary. Nate spent it chatting with Ada next to the old projection screen, while Nick investigated whether anything important or interesting had made it up the grapevine. Nothing much, this week. No kidnappings, no unusual sights, nothing on the Institute. Hopefully, that boded well.

There was a definite spring in Nate's step as they passed the Red Rocket and came up on the bridge. He gave a cheery wave to the man on watchtower duty, and Codsworth was already coming over to greet them before they'd taken five steps into the settlement proper.

While the two of them caught up, Nick delivered those fern samples to Curie's lab, set in one of the more intact houses. "Oh! Thank you so much," she said when he handed them over. "I will be able to derive much of the compound from these, and then we can start the molecular analysis and preparation for double-blind testing, yes?"

"Uh... yes?"

Her seeds had come up and were growing nicely. She was taking extensive notes on them, which she was only too happy to show them off on the terminal she and Nate had put together. Nick shook his head at Curie's hunt-and-peck technique as she entered her password, and his offhand comment turned into an impromptu teaching session.

"This seems very difficult to co-ordinate," Curie said, staring intently at his fingers as he typed random nonsense into a new file. "Humans have so many moving parts to keep track of."

"It's a bit tricky at first, yeah. Ellie picked it up in a couple of weeks, though. Types faster than I do now."

"Ellie?"

"My secretary. Once had to go hunt her down a better typewriter than the one she was using because the damned thing kept jamming from her typing so quickly."

Nate poked his head in an hour or so later, after Nick had taught Curie the basics of touch-typing. "Having fun, you two?" he asked, a smile on his face, rubbing at something with a cloth in his hands.

"Yes! Monsieur Valentine is teaching me how to write my notes more efficiently. Oh, what is that?" Curie asked, twisted around in her seat at what looked like a painful angle.

Nate held it up; it was some mechanical component that Nick didn't immediately recognize. "Doing some maintenance for Codsworth. Doesn't matter how high-quality that General Atomics engineering was, two hundred years without a checkup leads to a few glitches. He should be good to go as soon as I put this back in, though."

"Let me know if you have any difficulties. I am sure I can be of assistance," Curie chirped, before turning back to her typing practice. (It turned out she could think of a bunch of sentences that used all the letters of the alphabet, so while her typing was painfully slow, at least it was more than 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' over and over and over again.)

"Thanks, I'm fine for now."

"You sure you still don't do synths?"

Nate shook his head, lips quirking up into a smile. "Nope. Is this about that loose screw in your hand? You'd be better off talking to a mechanic for that."

"And miss out on the bedside manner?"

"Yeah, well." He glanced down at the piece in his hands. "Gotta go plug this back in. Good luck on the typing, Curie. You seem to be getting pretty good already."

"My current speed is approximately five words per minute with an accuracy of 97 percent. There is still much room for improvement."

When Curie finally got bored of the practice (she was already a lot faster than Ellie had been after her first day of typing), he left her to measuring her plants and wandered back over to Nate's place. Codsworth was flying around the place and dusting, his mechanisms a little less noisy than before, and carefully avoiding the island in the kitchen, which was covered in Vault-Tec lunchboxes. Nate himself was plonked on the rug, surrounded by tools and fiddling with what looked like the radio from the bar-slash-cafeteria a few doors down.

There was music playing, a slightly crackly Diamond City Radio, but that was coming from the Pip-Boy that Nate had taken off and set on the edge of the rug. Nick caught the tail end of one song and the beginning of _Uranium Fever_.

"Someone complained that this was picking up too much static and not enough music," Nate explained without looking up. "Need anything?"

"Well, doc, sometimes I feel like my wrist is falling apart. Anything to do for it?"

Nate laughed and shoved the radio aside, then patted the rug. "Okay, okay, I'll take a look. Seriously, Sturges is probably a better bet than me, though."

"Yes, but do I know Sturges and trust him with my very life? Or – well, you get the point." Nick crossed his legs and held out the metal hand for inspection. It was holding together, but that damn screw was starting to drive him up the wall, and lately it needed tightening more and more often, or the metal bones of his fingers wouldn't pull together properly.

Nate laughed. "I'll do my best, then." He took his hand, then it into the light and gave it a good look. Nick no longer had proper sensation there, of course, but he could tell that the pressure Nate put on the fingers was very light. "Is there a reason you can't just Wonderglue it in?"

"Now that you mention it... don't think I've tried it. Angle would be a bit awkward to do myself."

"Here." Nate picked up the nearest bottle (there were at least four scattered around that Nick could see) and gave it a good shake before putting it down again. "Can I take it out for just a sec?"

"Go ahead."

Nate unscrewed it quickly, then carefully squeezed the Wonderglue until a single drop came out and went right where he wanted. A few turns of the screwdriver later, and it looked like it was all set. "Give that a second to dry," Nate said, giving the hand a last look. He smiled and glanced up, still holding Nick's wrist. "Anything else I can do for you?"

Nick's metal heart shouldn't have had a reason to stop, but it damn sure felt like it did, because in that moment, in the bright artificial light, he looked like –

Black hair, the kind that was so dark it almost shone blue, pulled back from a smiling face. Blue eyes, not a dull shade next to gray, but the bright, clear color a poet could write about. _Anything else I can do for you?_ Jennifer asked, when he'd gone to her place after a long day of chasing up dead ends.

She'd made him coffee and listened to him complain about unhelpful leads and then knelt by the chair, took his hand in hers. Smiled at him. _Anything else I can do for you?_

"Nick? Nick, are you okay? Nick? Can you – can you hear me?"

Nick blinked, though it didn't clear the memory from his eyes. He closed them and gave his head a good shake, like it would reset something, and when he opened them again, Jenny was gone, and there was just a worried Nate in front of him, peering at his face.

"I'm fine," he said automatically.

"But. You weren't responding, and your, uh. Eyes went all dim. That's not 'fine'."

"Just a flash of the old Nick Valentine." He pulled his hand away and tested the fingers – everything worked perfectly. "I told you already, it happens from time to time. Side-effect of however the Institute put him in here in the first place. It's fine. Thanks for helping out with the hand."

"Okay," said Nate, still giving him that look – and god, that wasn't helping. He and Jenny didn't look _that_ alike, but Jenny had given him that exact same expression when they met up after a hard day and he didn't want to talk about it, to the point that a glance at Nate's face brought up echoes of five or so separate memories. It was unsettling, and Nick hastily tore his gaze away. "You're welcome?"

Nick made his excuses to get away and drifted down the line of old houses to have a smoke by the river. He leaned against a tree on a long inhale and stared at the slow flow of the river, murky in the fading light. Distantly, he could hear voices rising as dinner started, until he turned the volume down on his hearing – not too much, not so he couldn't hear any shouting if some idiot Raiders decided to attack – and tried to focus on where he was, not the visions still ghosting around his senses, clamoring for attention.

It was disconcerting. Here he was, Nick Valentine, detective, trying to reassure his fiance on a cold night with the rain soaked through his shoes, and here he was, Nick Valentine, detective, telling his fiance that Winter wasn't going to hurt either of them because the cops were gonna protect them, and here he was, Nick Valentine, detective, double-checking his mechanical hand and hoping that Nate wasn't worrying too much because Nate had plenty to worry about already.

Thankfully, the flashes were dying away already, fading for the here-and-now of the too-quiet trees and the pale moon rising to the east in front of him. Nick stubbed out his smoke when he was finished and stuck the remains in his pocket to throw out later, then decided to give himself a couple more minutes. It was kind of nice out here, safer than the real wilderness, more peaceful than Diamond City.

"Hello?" someone called from his left – Garvey.

"Just me," he called back, shifting his weight off the tree and turning so Garvey could see him better.

"Okay. Just doing a perimeter check before dinner. Are you joining us tonight? We could use some of your stories if you're up for it."

"Sure, why not."

He accompanied Garvey the short way down to the bridge and then up to where everyone had settled down for dinner. Curie waved at him. "Monsieur Valentine! I have now achieved ten words per minute with 89 percent accuracy!"

"Gosh, already?" he said as he sat next to her, opposite from Nate. "You'll be typing up whole journals in no time."

Nate shot him a glance, for a moment – then he coughed and turned away. Right; Nate, unlike half the population both before and after the war, couldn't abide the scent of cigarettes. Nick had been trying to slow down his habit for his sake, when decades of combating the tar buildup in his system had never made him try. It was ridiculous, anyway – he was a synth, everything about the ritual was psychological – but it had been surprisingly difficult to try and get rid of. Too bad he couldn't take some overpriced Addictol and find some other calming habit.

There wasn't anywhere else to move to, though, and he was already being pressed for a story as a smiling Ghoul – what was his name? The Vault-Tec guy – ladled out a second helping of stew to those who had finished their first.

"C'mon, tells us a good one!"

"Got any locked-room mysteries?"

The primary need at Sanctuary, as of late, always seemed to be entertainment. "Alright, alright, give me a moment to think about it," he said, and settled on a recent adventure of his and Nate's. "So, anyone here ever hear of – hold on, let me say this right – _The Siiiilver Shrouuud_?"

Nate dropped his spoon into his bowl and bent double with suppressed laughter. Nick shot him a grin as something warm flared in him, before turning back to the rapt audience.

~!~

After a month of nothing and another of Nate's visits to the Institute, Nick started to wonder if they were serious about bringing him in, after all. He was careful, as he had promised Nate, but there were a lot of other things to be careful about. Random mines in the streets when he and Ellie visited Goodneighbor for a case, goons with guns, Brotherhood patrols that had no qualms about barking at him like he was programmed to obey their orders...

Still, the Institute was good at stealing in when nobody noticed. (Last Nick had heard, the guys who kept Diamond City's power flowing were _still_ figuring out how to untangle whatever it was that they were using to leech off the town's supply.) He had seen a Courser or two in his day, and he was ready to run at the first sign of that uniform.

Nate swung by the Agency on a sunny day, looking cheerier than usual. "Hey, how are things going around here?"

"Good timing," said Ellie. "Nick was just about to head out on a case. You going with?"

"Sure," said Nate, just as Nick stepped off the stairs behind him. He twisted around to give him a smile. "What case?"

"Another runaway lover," he said with a sigh. "Young man, out of towner, leaves the girl he's been shacked up with for months. At night. Without telling any of his friends. It was hard to get anything out of the lady, so who knows if there's anything gone wrong between them."

"Fifty fifty he got cold feet versus got tangled up in some trouble from before he came here," said Ellie.

"It's too early to speculate. Let us know if you hear anything, Ellie."

"Of course. Good luck figuring it out. And stay safe out there, you two."

"Don't we always come back in one piece?" he asked, and she waved them out with a tilted grin.

This time, it was Nate who hung back and let Nick do most of the talking as they went up to a few town guards and asked after the man. One of them was able to give them a lead on which direction he had gone, and in a few minutes they were on their way out of town. There still wasn't much to go on as to _why_ he had left, though; as Ellie had said, it could be he suddenly got scared of commitment and wanted out, or involved in some other trouble, or, hell, Nick had seen people that just got into confused states and lost track of who or where they were for a while.

He didn't leave much of a trail, either. They searched a few blocks out, Nick still trying to figure if there was anything this way the guy might have been trying to get to – or perhaps he'd turned somewhere for all they knew – until they got lucky and found a hat abandoned on a table in the second level of what had been a parking garage once, and now sometimes became a Raider base for a couple of weeks at a time. The hat exactly matched the description his girlfriend had given Nick as something he wore all the time.

"So he came through here," said Nate, and he cast a doubtful look around. "For what? And why leave his hat?"

"There's a decent lookout here," said Nick, waving Nate over. "Maybe he was meeting someone. Or trying not to meet them. Could even have been resting a while and wanted to make sure no trouble was coming. As for the hat... who knows. Shedding an identity? Forgotten when he rushed out?" He gave the parking level another scan and didn't see anything further – no footprints, bloodstains, strange items, computer terminals with criminally low security... how convenient.

He glanced out again and spotted the start of an alley that someone sitting here could just see into. It seemed like a decent place to meet someone for a hidden conversation.

Nate followed him out of the garage and to the alley. Navigating it was more difficult than it had looked – by now it was filled with piles of debris, broken bricks and smashed wood and twisted pieces of metal. "Careful, Nick," Nate said from behind.

"Careful yourself. Don't think they make tetanus shots anymore."

"I know I got a booster some two hundred years ago now, but the antibodies should be plenty fresh still."

They moved along as quietly as they could, which wasn't that quiet with all the trash underfoot. After clambering over a second upturned dumpster, the pile that Nick was standing on suddenly collapsed. His systems couldn't compensate for the altered balance in time; he might have smashed his head right into the brick wall if Nate hadn't grabbed his arm with his free hand to catch him.

Nick grabbed back and scrambled for a more solid footing. "Thanks," he murmured when he thought he'd found it, though he gave the ground a good look before releasing his grip on Nate's shoulder.

"You okay?" Nate whispered back. He let go, slowly, only when Nick nodded, then frowned at the rest of the alley ahead.

The going didn't look any easier from here on, and it was difficult to tell if anyone had come this way recently. Besides all the noise they were making, the exertion of trying to creep over and around everything was leaving Nate panting. Nick was about to suggest that maybe they ought to head back when he thought he heard something.

He held up a hand to let Nate know to wait a moment, and turned his hearing sensitivity all the way up. It was hard to separate from the wind and distant gunfire and Nate's breath beside him, but there was definitely a conversation going on up there.

"Let's go."

After another block or so, the alleyway got cleaner, and it was easier to triangulate where the voices were coming from. One male, one female – could be their missing man. They crept closer, close enough to eavesdrop.

"...from the mayor."

"Anything... have to report?"

"...right now."

"And the..."

"Still running his... see him out talking with people a lot..."

The other participant, the woman, got one word into her next reply – Nick couldn't quite make it out – before she stopped. Beside him, Nate suddenly held his breath.

There was the distinctive hum of a laser rifle turning on. "Who's there? Show yourself!"

Nate's brow wrinkled. "Hold on. I think I know her voice." And before Nick could stop him, he ducked out from the wall they were hiding behind. "Hey, it's just me." Nick bit down a sharp comment – now wasn't the time – and followed him out.

"Sir!" There was there missing man, shrinking against the wall behind – just Nate's luck – a Courser, a tall woman with short blond hair groomed into perfect waves pre-War women would have killed to achieve. "I wasn't aware that you were part of this mission, sir." Then her eyes switched from Nate to Nick. "And you brought the prototype. Excellent. Thank you, sir. If you can give me just a moment to finish my questions, we can return to the Institute."

For a moment – a short one, on the outside, but Nick's brain was capable of thinking an awful lot of things real fast when it wanted to – Nick doubted. He thought maybe those thoughts all those months ago, during that awful week when Nate had been seeing the Institute for the first time, maybe those had been right. Maybe this wasn't the Nate who had become his partner, but a version sent out by the Institute to wreak whatever havoc they wished.

 _No_ , he told himself after that moment was over, because he _knew_ Nate wasn't like that, he was too good towards others and looked at Nick too kindly, and Nick trusted.

"No," he heard a moment later, as Nate took a step back, and then a step to the side. The step took him directly between Nick and the Courser.

"Sir?"

"No, he's not – I'll go with you if you need me for something. But he's not coming."

The Courser frowned. "Excuse me, I need to confirm something." She pressed something on her earpiece, murmured lowly, didn't break eye contact.

Nate took another step back, so he was right in front of Nick, but kept his gun lowered, his body posture non-threatening. The other synth had backed into a corner, and he didn't look armed, or prepared to fight.

" _Nate_."

"Hold on. Just a moment," Nate murmured back.

The Courser lowered her hand. "You are ordered to bring the prototype with you when we return to the Institute."

Nate took a deep breath, let it out real slow. "Okay," he said. Nick didn't like the quality to his voice. "Just, uh. Give me a second, okay? I'll be ready then." Nick liked it even less when he turned around; he had that narrow-lipped, determined face on. The kind that he put on right before he burst into hostile territory or the middle of a fight because of some wrong he had to right, without any regard for his own safety.

"Nate," he whispered as quietly as he could and still be heard under the Courser barking at the other synth. "What damn fool plan are you thinking of?"

"Sorry," Nate whispered. He casually slipped his spare hand in to one of his many, many pockets. "I know I – sorry for worrying you. Just. They'd be nicer to me than you, wouldn't they. I'm Shaun's uncle. I know things they want to know. They wouldn't hurt me too much. And they can't reprogram me." The hand slipped out, now holding something small, concealed by those broad fingers that were rough from sharp electronics and the elements and yet so deft.

"I'm not leaving you alone with them."

"Then who's gonna tell everyone what happened if it doesn't work?"

"Dammit, Nate—"

"Sorry, sorry." He had a strange half-smile on his face, his blue eyes gone wide. "Please. It's not like I'm going to sit here. _Please_."

He pressed the object to Nick's coat. Nick had barely grabbed ahold of it – fumbled it, really, though it only dropped a few inches – when Nate whirled about and raised his rifle in one smooth motion to fire on the Courser.

She stumbled from the first hit, green plasma splashing brilliantly bright across her coat; she twisted in time to dodge the second, then activated a Stealth Boy. Nick could follow her movements to some degree – something about the distortion a Stealth Boy caused was accounted for by one of his visual processing algorithms – and he could tell that she was headed for him, not Nate. (Also, she had briefly pressed a hand to her earpiece. Dammit, she was calling for backup.)

Of course, Nate had an advantage she didn't know about – the Pip-Boy came with a neat little program that could assist him with aiming over long distances or on quick enemies, and a Stealth Boy did nothing to stop it. Nate got another two shots in, rippling the stealth field, as he backed up.

 _Please_ , Nate had said, with that open expression, his hair sticking to his face and his eyes so—

He had no choice but to trust his partner, in that moment.

Nick cursed again in his head as he did what he didn't want to do: he turned, still clutching Nate's gift to his coat, and sprinted off. Said gift turned out to be a pulse grenade; Nick slid a finger through the pin as he turned a corner, picking a direction at random. A laser rifle pulsed, and he could smell something burning behind him.

Goddammit, Nate better get out of here unhurt, or else Nick was going to break into the Institute and drag him out himself.

There was a sudden charge in the air; Nick pulled the pin on the grenade and tossed it toward the epicenter and kept running, turned another corner. There was a loud _crack_ as light filled the alleyway, as did the strong scent of burned wood and ozone. The grenade went off a moment later, causing the synth caught in its blast to cry out, though thankfully Nick was out of its damaging range and just had his sense flood with the odd scent they left behind in the air.

He skidded around another turn and bit back yet another curse; this one was too full of junk to clamber over in any reasonable amount of time. He turned and ran the other way before the synth he'd hit could fully recover from the grenade, though that was precious seconds lost. This way was more clear, though there were spare crates and trashcans to hide behind if need be.

He could still hear the crackle of plasma hitting a target. Good. They hadn't got Nate yet. There were also boots on the ground behind him, someone shouting an order at him. He ignored it, and ignored the internal warning from his coolant system, too.

Another corner – he had to be getting to the edge of this maze of tiny back streets, surely. But first, he unholstered his own laser rifle from his back, where he had put it to keep from getting in the way as they navigated the alley. Now he aimed it in the direction he'd come from, and as soon as the other synth showed up – another Courser – he let off three shots. Hit him right in the head, too, good; that would daze him another few seconds.

A few more twists and turns, several shots he ducked away from, one that grazed his elbow, a few return shots of his own, and there was the street. Nick didn't know which way was which – he'd been too busy trying not to get hit to pay close attention to the turns, and it wasn't like he'd been built with a compass embedded somewhere, as useful as that would have been. He picked a direction at random and started to dash up the street. Odd, he couldn't hear footprints behind him any longer.

He found out why a moment later as the Courser burst out of another exit and slammed into him, knocking his gun aside. They tumbled to the asphalt, the Courser trying to pin him, Nick wriggling and kicking. He scraped his metal arm across the Courser's eyes on an instinct and didn't feel bad at all when it caused him to recoil and scream in pain, just struggled harder.

"Unit N1-65!" the Courser shouted, still trying to hold Nick down with both hands despite the way his eyes were screwed shut.

Oh, no. Oh, oh no. Nick twisted his head and bit the guy's fingers where they were curled around his shoulder. _Hard_. Clawed at him again. The Courser paused, but retorted by snapping one of Nick's forearms around in a way that it was decidedly not made to go. Every synthetic nerve in that arm lit up with pain, enough to leave Nick dizzy.

( _Why the hell did they program us to feel pain_ , and Nate had taken it seriously and said that pain was the consequence of being a living being, that it existed to warn them of damage and danger.

Then he'd asked if Nick was okay, and looked at him with those worried eyes like he was afraid that he'd missed an injury.)

"Unit N1-65, recall code," the Courser was saying, and this time Nick's struggles were too weak to interrupt him. "Beta four one eddy."

There was nothing he could do; everything went dark.

~!~

"...amazing architecture. How's the search for records coming along?"

"We've still got a few databases to go through, but we should have it in a day or two at the most."

"Good. We only have the one subject."

"According to what we found, there should be one more, but we haven't found out what happened with it yet. Could have been decommissioned, I suppose."

Nick couldn't move. Not a single flicker of an eyelid, not a twitch of a single artificial muscle. His hearing was off, too, everything coming in tinny and distorted, and he couldn't tell where any of the sounds were coming from.

"Wait a moment, look at this... he's awake."

"What? Why? Turn it back off."

There was the sound of keys being struck, and just like the candle in the story of Alice in Wonderland, he went out altogether.

~!~

"Astounding. Have you seen the code dump yet?"

"No, not the documentation either, before you ask. But I heard that even taking into account the antiquated version of the language, the programming was amazing."

"And we know that it works well, if it's hung together all these years. Obviously there's been some wear and tear, but... I wonder if we could fix any of it."

" _I'd_ rather put him in a Gen 3 body."

"Easier said than done. We'd risk destroying everything that makes it unique in the process, or damaging it."

"Uh, sir, it's waking up again."

" _Again_? Why?"

"I'm not sure. Something in the code, maybe. A self-preservation routine. I'll deactivate it again."

~!~

This time, when Nick awoke, he felt less groggy, and there was nobody talking over him, both of which were great improvements over the last... few? It was hard to be sure.

He still couldn't feel most of his body, though – nothing below the neck – and he definitely couldn't move any of it. His head was resting on something above the rest of the table, and after a few seconds it shifted. Odd. Someone's leg? It felt more like that than anything else.

He was moved slightly, his head tipped back. A sigh. "Sorry about this," someone murmured. Nate. What the hell was Nate doing here? Why was Nick's head in his lap?

 _Click click_ went something made of metal, and a moment later he could feel something slide into his neck, a screwdriver. A momentary wave of panic washed over him, and he couldn't even do anything about it – couldn't fight, couldn't shout, couldn't even open his eyes. It wasn't right to have something in there that wasn't meant to be, least of all when it wasn't him trying to jury-rig a repair or sort out a twisted wire.

 _It's just Nate_ , he told himself a moment later, and some of the panic ebbed, though certainly not all of it.

"I hope this doesn't hurt," Nate said. "If you're awake right now. One of the scientists was complaining that you kept coming back online and they couldn't figure out why. It turns out they got you kind of banged up bringing you here, and apparently I'm the expert." He chuckled without any mirth. "Like I'd ever ask to look in here unless I had to. I. I hope I'm doing this right. You're, uh, more difficult than a radio, Nick. Or even Codsworth. At least they like you. That's good, right? They keep saying your AI is so advanced, they want to study you. Ugh. Sorry. But at least they want to keep you whole." Nate swallowed loudly. "I'm sorry," he said again. "I wish this hadn't happened. Sorry."

 _It's not your fault_ , he wanted to say, but the Institute hadn't built them with telepathy, so it did jack-all. _You told me to be careful. Not your fault we walked right into a Courser._ Hell, if Nate hadn't come with on the mystery, things might have ended up worse somehow. At least he'd tried.

"Can't see what's going on. Even with all these lights. Did they give me... oh, here it is." A soft click. "Oh, boy. You've got a lot going on in there, Nick." A very soft and gentle touch on the edge of his torn skin. "Sorry."

If it felt strange having a screwdriver poking around in there (now, thankfully, withdrawn), it felt even worse having fingers that weren't his own in his neck, even ones prodding as carefully as Nate's were.

Those fingers paused as the doors _whooshed_ open. Nick felt a rush of air, heard footsteps echoing loudly – was this a small room? Sounded like it.

The footsteps paused. Nate did nothing to acknowledge the new person, far as Nick could tell; after a second, he started moving his fingers again, feeling around a part of the component that formed his voice box before slipping further in towards his spine. It was sure giving Nick a case of the heebie-jeebies, and not even being able to voice his discontent was not helping.

After several minutes, whoever-it-was cleared his throat. "Uncle," he said, his voice soft and even, and Nick would have sworn it felt like a chill swept over him. This had to be Shaun, then.

Nate swallowed again, not so loudly this time. "Shaun," he said. "I told you. I can't talk with you right now. This goes double _right now_."

"I know you're very fond of this model, and I apologize for the way it was treated. I can assure you, I have communicated to those responsible that—"

"Shaun. I _said_. I cannot talk with you right now. Not about this."

"Uncle," Shaun said, and at that Nate slid his hands away from Nick's neck. "I realize that you are upset with me. But I don't wish for there to be ill-will between us, and I don't have the time to—"

There was the soft scrape of metal on metal as Nate picked something up – toolbox? – followed by a deafening _clang_ as he slammed it back down. Nick would have jumped out of his skin if he could twitch anything.

After the echoes cleared, the room went real quiet again, save for the background hum of machinery.

"That," said Nate. "That represents my emotional state toward you right now. I thought it was bad before, but, uh. Shaun. _Shaun_. I know I'm not your mom, or your dad. Or even as good as either of them. Or the parents who raised you here. But. Even just as another human being. You don't _listen_ to me, and you're doing that _right now_ when we just argued a few hours ago and I. Don't have the emotional bandwidth to sort it out. Okay? Especially now since your scientists screwed Nick up. And apparently they think I can fix him. I've never done this before, you know. So either get a flashlight and help me or go away."

There was another long silence, and then more footsteps; _click_ , soft and close. "Tell me where to point it."

"Here – no, do it more from the side, otherwise my hand is going to get in the way." Shaun shuffled a bit. "That's fine." A hand tipped his head farther back, and he could feel Nate's weight shifting, the legs under his head moving. Trying to get a better look? "Oh, geez. Okay, I think I can fix this, but it's gonna be a pain. Sorry, Nick. Lots more poking around to go. At least you'll be able to feel your legs when it's done."

"This unit is off," Shaun said.

" _He_ apparently has a system that likes to boot him up. So he might not be. Look, if someone was poking around in your neck, you'd like them to be nice about it, too. Don't give me that look. They can feel pain. They can suffer. You made it so they can suffer. So stop."

They went quiet for a long while, except for Nate muttering to himself as he fixed up Nick's spinal cord. Meanwhile, Nick's own primary diagnostics finally finished running and threw up a whole slew of error messages. If he followed the tracebacks, they all pointed to the most important of the errors, which basically said that his spine was disconnected from itself. He had to wonder what kind of force he'd been hit with that it could have 'accidentally' gotten severed; he'd had some pretty bad falls before, screwed up connections and moving bits, but never had he effectively paralyzed himself.

If there were any other issues going on, it was hard to tell until Nate put him back together, though he did find a few 'unauthorized user login attempt' warnings. There were several in a row, then a pause, then several more in a row, the last of which was several days past by his internal clock. They might have figured out how to access his brain at that point, a thought that worried at him. Without nothing else to distract him – Nate and Shaun were still not talking to each other, and it was hopeless to try and guess what, exactly, Nate was trying to do in his neck – it was hard to push it away. So the Institute quite possibly had access to his memories, his personality, his everything. There were so many awful things they could do with that, it was hard to start counting. Erase his memories, re-write his personality, try to transfer him or copy him...

Something slipped in his neck, and Nate cursed. "Sorry, Nick," he said for what had to be the fiftieth time in the past hour. They were going to have to talk about that later, if they got the chance. "Come back here... okay, got it. Don't worry, almost done. Think we'll have you working again just fine." Thank god. The secondary diagnostics were about 70% of the way through, and then the safety mechanisms that looked as though they were preventing him from even opening his eyes would shut off. If there was nothing else wrong, at least he could get a good look at Nate, try to see if he was okay, say a few words of gratitude. Ask him to tell Ellie a couple of things, just in case.

"You're quite attached to... him, aren't you," Shaun commented.

"Pretty easy when you've been through a lot together. Saved my life more than a few times. People get scared of him if they don't know him, sometimes. But. He tries to help them out anyway. Tells stories. Does patrols. Comforts children. Taught my friend Curie how to use a keyboard. And he finds things, people, lost and missing ones. Without him, I wouldn't've found you."

"Really?"

"He's doing a hell of a lot more to help the Commonwealth than any of you are."

Hearing Nate say such nice things might have set Nick's heart aflutter, if his had worked that way. (Actually, come to think of it, he didn't remember human Nick's heart ever 'fluttering' in anyway except metaphorically, not even when Jenny had said yes to his proposal and knocked him over in her eagerness to kiss him. Did _human_ hearts work that way?)

A sigh. "Uncle..."

A frustrated sigh from above him. Maybe it ran in the family. "What, you beat up my robot friend, you break him, and you can't even listen to me for a bit? Didn't they teach you about fair trade down here?" This provoked a laugh from Shaun, and a few seconds later, Nate made a pleased sound. "Okay, just gotta put this back together and—"

An excruciating shock went through Nick, sending his vision white. He tried to writhe, gasp, scream, anything, but his body refused to move. Just as it had started to fade, leaving his ears ringing with a faint low pitch, two things happened almost at once.

The first was his secondary diagnostics finished running. The ones that had been able to run came back with no errors, but there was a huge number of warnings from the tests that couldn't run because of his spine.

The second was that there was another shock, even worse than the first one. This time, Nick felt himself arch sharply off the table, scrabbling at the metal surface like it would do anything to resolve the pain. His legs twitched, and his voice box made wheezy little sounds instead of the shout he wanted to make.

This one ended more suddenly, leaving him to collapse, panting. There were hands on his face. Above the tones in his ears, Nick realized someone was calling his name.

He opened his eyes. There was Nate, above him, wide-eyed. What pretty blue eyes, Nick thought, still feeling hazy. Nate's hair was falling in his face, but he didn't look hurt from this angle. Just worried.

He blinked, once, twice. "Nate?" This time his voice came out as he had intended, not even raspy.

Those beautiful eyes above him looked a bit teary all of a sudden. "Nick, are you – are you okay?"

"Getting your spine put back together hurts like hell. Don't recommend it. Keep yours intact, okay? Hey, don't look like that. I'm fine, now."

"So he _was_ awake. Fascinating." Nick turned his head – it protested a bit, but it had been a while since he was happy to make such a basic action – and took in Shaun. He looked – well, a lot like Nate. A lot like the frozen corpse of his sister-in-law, whom he had taken Nick to see once. Older, grayer, not as dark; he looked pretty pleasant, actually, like a reasonable man who would make a good boss. He was still holding the flashlight, and it was still on. "Have you regained full sensation and mobility?"

"Nice to meet you, too, Shaun," Nick grumbled. Shaun looked taken aback, before his eyes lit up, just a little. Nick didn't know what to make of it, so he turned away and focused on trying all his limbs out.

Nate helped him sit up. He wasn't in his trench coat and suit any longer; they'd re-dressed him in a blank Institute jumpsuit. The material was uncomfortable compared to the well-worn cotton he was used to. He moved his fingers, toes, bent his knees, rolled his shoulders – everything seemed to be fine. "How is it?" Nate asked, one hand still curled loosely around his upper arm.

"You're a miracle worker, doc. I'd have to run another diagnostic to be sure, but everything feels like it's in working order."

He saw the tense set of Nate's shoulders relax at that, and he ran a hand through his hair. The smile he gave Nick was tired, but bright, and despite the circumstances, Nick couldn't help but smile back at him. "Hey," he started to say.

"Well, if he's been reapired, it looks like we're done for now." _Click_. "Unit N1-65, recall code," said Shaun from behind him. Nate whipped around, smile lost in an instant.

"Shaun, _stop_!"

Nick was turning, too, but Shaun had backed up a couple of steps, and there wasn't time to lunge and grab him. _Dammit_. Not again.

"Beta four one eddy."

He didn't even feel his head hit the table.

~!~

Nick woke up. Again. His primary diagnostics started to run. _Again_. He was getting sick of this.

"What's it doing? I thought you turned it on."

"His version seems to have a built-in function to start running diagnostics when he's turned on after a recall. Until the primary one is done, at least he won't be able to move. I _think_ I know how to skip past it if you like but it might be safer to go ahead and let it run, make sure everything is working correctly now."

"Oh, sure. There's no hurry. Gosh, look at that code. Even though we've improved the language itself so much since then, you really have to commend the programmers. It's so readable. And the headers! If my coders wrote such good comments on their functions, I'd get a lot more sleep."

"They really did know what they were doing. Did we ever find out why he was discarded?"

"Huh? He wasn't. What are you talking about?"

"That's what I heard from the Director's uncle."

"No, no. He and another prototype model escaped. It's in the records. Wonder where the other one went off to..."

Escaped?

Nick stopped paying any attention to the conversation going on above his head. Escaped? Was it true? He could remember, still, vividly, all these years later, his first moments in the Wasteland. Beneath him, a pile of broken, unmoving first-gens. Above, a clear blue sky. Silence like he had rarely heard before, the kind of silent a city like Boston didn't get even in the early, early morning. He had sat up, confused, flashes of Institute testing chambers mixing with old Nick's last memories of entering the brain scanner. He was lucky that he woke up in a relatively calm area; he found shelter in an old building by nightfall and watched his first radstorm, fascinated by the strange lightning, unable to tear himself away from the window.

He hadn't been able to put any context to that time for ages. Being tossed out had seemed like the only thing that made sense. If he truly had escaped with another synth, well, he was also lucky that it had been before there were Coursers, before the Institute had much power on the surface. (But then, what had happened to that other synth? Why hadn't they been together? Maybe the Institute failsafes were built differently in both of them, caused them to wander off from each other somehow? Still, Nick should have met them by now if they'd stayed in the area. The Commonwealth was only so big.)

With nothing major going wrong inside of him, his diagnostics finished much more quickly this time. They reported a few minor errors – some of them were the same ones he'd been ignoring for decades at this point – and released control back to him. Nick immediately opened his eyes and swung himself up to a sitting position on the exam table, legs dangling off.

"Oh!" One of the two scientists in the room – an older woman, not the one sitting at the terminal – jumped, then broke into a smile. "Excellent! It seems to be working."

"Excuse you," he snapped.

"Er, yes." The tech at the computer, a young man, glanced between Nick and the woman. "He, um, you, whatever, seem to be in good shape. The Director's uncle did a good job with that repair."

The woman busied herself with a stack of clipboards; the man turned back to the terminal, slowly pressing the arrow keys as he read the screen. Since they weren't explaining anything, Nick took the opportunity to see where he was.

A room just about as generic as the one he'd been in last time. One terminal on a desk, one exam table, faint whooshing noises from the air ducts, even fainter echoes of conversations outside the door. Shiny white everything, except where it was shiny metal. There was a wire leading from him – Nick prodded around and found it was coming from the base of his skull where a small plate had been removed, eugh – to the terminal. When he reached up to try and unplug it, the woman suddenly appeared by him and yanked his wrist away.

She was smiling like an old-time door-to-door seller. After all these years, it gave him the same wary feeling. "Let's not, shall we," she said with all cheer, letting go, and then she pulled the second chair from the desk and over in front of where he was sitting. She sat down, arranged a clipboard stuffed with papers in her lap, and clicked her pen a couple of times. Still smiling at him. It seriously made his skin crawl.

"We have some questions for you."

"That's nice."

Her smile, impossibly, broadened. "Let's start with something simple. Do you know what your designation is?"

"My _name_ is Nick Valentine." He looked around the room again. He was itching to get away. The guy at the computer was giving him a nervous look; Nick looked back, not blinking, until the man glanced away.

"Right, right," the woman was saying, already scribbling madly. "What do you remember before coming here?"

"Well, I remember that Nate had to stick a screwdriver down my throat while his nephew insisted on helping, and before that I was busy getting kidnapped, and at some point before that I was having a pretty nice day. You ever see the weather outside? Blue skies going on forever, a soft breeze, the sound of seagulls calling over the water."

The woman gave him a confused look. Nick tried to read what she was writing, but the clipboard was angled away from him.

Speaking of Nate, where _was_ he? Nick felt a stab of worry. Sure, he was the Director's family, but there were ways to be awful to someone while pretending to be kind. Nick had seen plenty of them before. "Hm," the man at the computer said. "Why is this going up... oh, that's..."

"Where's Nate?" he demanded, before the woman could ask another question.

"I'm not sure where he is just now – he may be resting, or in a meeting – but I can assure you, he is doing just fine. In fact, since he brought you here, he's been adjusting better than ever to our way of live. Hasn't left for the surface once. Now, we have few questions for a test we're developing, they may seem a bit strange..."

Probably because he was worrying too much over an old robot and not nearly enough over himself. As Nate did. If they were willing to let him leave again. He _had_ fired on the Courser, after all. And 'brought you here'? She sounded so earnest, did she not know?

"...if you saw the tortoise flipped on its back, what would you do?"

"Very funny. I saw that movie, too. Back when it was still in theaters. I'd flip it back over and put it somewhere off the road for good measure," he added before the woman could finish opening her mouth again. "Are we done?"

"We can skip this portion for now." She flipped past a few pages on her clipboard, murmuring to herself. She sounded disappointed that he wasn't co-operating with the shiny new test she wanted to try out. "How did you become aware that you are a synth? It wasn't in your design."

Oh, boy. "The metal parts were a big clue." He looked around once more, about ready to jump off the table and see if he couldn't find Nate despite realizing that he needed better timing, more information. "Also the beeping."

"Beeping?" The woman looked lost.

"Yep." She was clearly waiting on an elaboration; he wondered how long it would take before she realized he wasn't going to give one.

By his internal clock – steadily ticking off microseconds after all these years – it was an awkward seventy-two seconds. Unusually patient, this one. Most of his clients couldn't wait five even if he had to rifle through a whole file drawer to look up what he and they needed. "Beeping," she repeated, then wrote something down.

Thankfully, at this point the door opened, and the one person Nick did and didn't want to see most of all stepped through, followed by a shadow who was probably a synth. "Nick!" Nate's eyes lit up, and his mouth twisted into a relieved grin. The sight calmed Nick's heart for just a moment, then sent it racing again. "You're awake. Are you okay?"

"For the most part. We're having a grand time playing twenty questions. Want to join in?"

"Sir," the synth started, then faltered as Nate waved him off.

"Sure, why not. If these two don't mind? I'd hate to interrupt your work."

Nate didn't like the woman's new, excited expression. "Of course not," she said, paging through yet more paper. "In fact, go ahead and catch up, if you like. We need natural-context conversational data anyway, we can capture it now."

"Um, sure." Nate gave her tiny smile and hopped up on the table next to Nick. "Hey, what's this?" He reached out and touched the wire leading out of Nick's skull. The feeling was odd; it made him shudder.

"We're collecting live data," the man at the terminal said, not turning around. "Essentially, it's a dump of the raw input from his sensors and various outputs of different processes. We're having difficulty finding much of the original plans – a lot of disk failures have occurred since he was put together – and we're hoping to recapture as much of it as we can."

"I see," Nate said, fingers sliding along the cable, and then he pulled it out. The _clack clack_ from the terminal suddenly ceased. Nick gave himself a good shake – much better. Nobody needed to have wires coming out of their brains. "Anyway," Nate said, bright – too bright, actually, now that they were up close. "D'you know how long we've been here?"

"What, that oversized watch doesn't tell you?" Still, he checked his internal chronometer again and was shocked to find that it had been nearly two weeks. He had been out for that long? He was reminded again of what they could have done to him with all that time.

"It only tells me the date, not when we got here. And I was kind of busy for a while. So I know it's been at least a few days, but..."

"Twelve."

"Wow, really?"

"Um," the guy at the computer said. "Sir? Why did you..." He was speaking real slow. Nick got the feeling that he wasn't used to talking back to people.

"It looked uncomfortable, and he works just fine without it. Trust me, I've seen him do a lot."

"It _was_ uncomfortable," Nick groused, rubbing at the spot again. It was still open to the air; he didn't like it. "You ever have a computer demanding data from your brain a couple dozen times a second?"

"Um," he said again. "No?"

"Well, then, how about you _ask_ next time?"

The woman – writing madly once again – raised an eyebrow at that and jotted something down. The clipboard had slipped on her lap, enough for Nick to catch a glimpse. It looked like some sort of shorthand, unless she just had worse handwriting than every doctor he'd ever met. Didn't look the kind he used, or the sort Piper had developed. Ah, well.

Nate gave him an awkward smile that only turned up one corner of his mouth. He had the same worried look to his eyes as he had when they got separated during a firefight, or got lost from each other too long while exploring some wrecked building, the quiet kind of worry that had him sticking close to Nick afterward.

"Sir," the synth who had come with Nate said, only to be interrupted by the woman.

"Sir, may I ask how you found this unit?"

"Uh. Sure." His legs swung idly. "I heard that he was good at finding people but that he'd gone missing on a previous job, so I went to where he'd gone and he was locked in a room by the gang occupying it. So I let him out."

"Bit short on the details there, Nate."

"Sorry, it's kind of a blur now."

"So you weren't looking for it specifically?"

"No? I don't think I even knew what the Institute was back then. I just knew I needed to find _him_ to find the person I was looking for."

"Sir," the synth tried again. "Father is expecting you for a meeting."

"Shaun can wait," said Nate, twitching a little.

"Oh," the woman said, pausing. "Well, so can we – we have a lot of other data to collect. If it's the Director, you should go."

Nate looked at Nick, his mouth twisted. "Wouldn't want to keep the _Director_ waiting." It hurt to see Nate frown further at that; Nick would be the last to force him to meet with his nephew if he didn't want to, but there was also no point in pissing him off to, what, assuage Nate's own worry? "C'mon, Nate, I'll keep," he said lowly, leaning in. _Play along until they let you out_ (if indeed they were trying to keep Nate here – he had to think they were if he hadn't left yet), he tried to get across.

"Fine," Nate said, sliding off the table and storming out, the synth close on his heels.

The woman looked thoughtful, and her eyes stared past the door a few seconds after it shut, then glanced at Nick before she slowly added a new note at the top of a blank page. Not in shorthand, this time. _V. strong attachment?_ Nick read.

The guy at the computer was still scowling. He reached over to pick up the cable. Nick eyed him and scooted further down the table. "If you think you're shoving _that_ back in my skull..."

He sighed and started rolling it up, twisting it around his hand. "We'll try again later," he promised.

 _Like hell_ , Nick thought.

~!~

There were endless experiments the scientists wanted to run on him, ranging from boring to downright unpleasant. (The one exception had been the time they tried to feed him Fancy Lads Snack Cakes and quizzed him extensively about his reaction. That one was just plain weird.) Some of them seemed amused when he didn't cooperate, even asked nicely; others got angry when they realized he didn't just obey orders whenever they demanded something from him, or when he ignored them because they'd tried using that awful jumble of letters and numbers rather than his goddamn name.

Nick was somewhat pleased to note, however, that even the most hardcore 'synths are machines, not people' researchers struggled to remember to address him as an it as time went on, and one day most of them switched to he. Nate said it was because someone had pointed out in a memo that he was based on a real person and thus had real memories and a real personality, at least in the eyes of some Institute members. Not that it should have made a difference.

Not that it stopped them from treating him as less of a person than any of them. Nick should have been used to it, after all this time, but no. He'd gotten used to Ellie, and Nate, and people like them, and the way they'd been more adamant about his humanity that he was. Constantly hearing about how amazing his programming was didn't exactly cheer him up.

Nate visited a lot, actually, and several of the scientists seemed happy to sit back and watch them interact. Nick wished at first that he would go back to the surface, already, get on with his life, leave an old synth to his fate, even as he was selfishly glad to see him each time. Nate seemed tired a lot, bags marring the skin under his beautiful eyes, but would never explain why. After the fifth or so visit, where they talked about the oh-so-exciting news from the hydroponics garden, Nick was trying to puzzle out just what Nate was planning. It had to be something. There was more than just exhaustion in his eyes.

"You gotta get some sleep, Nate," he said during one such visit.

Nate groaned and pressed a hand to his forehead, then dropped it to push his forehead against Nick's shoulder. For once, nobody was paying them too much attention where they were sitting on a desk in the corner; there was some kind of meeting going on. Very important. All hands on deck. From what Nick had overheard, it had to do with power cuts. Hopefully, that meant the guys up in Diamond City had figured out how to stop the leeching. "It's too quiet," he muttered. "Too lonely. Got used to having someone watch my back while I sleep. Even before the bombs, Nora'd be up all hours with Shaun, with getting work down."

"Radio not helpful?"

"Diamond City's too loud. Could try the classical station, I guess. Ugh. Do you remember when there were fifty stations and you could never find what you wanted to listen to?"

"You'd always end up on some sort of classic music station for a few minutes because it was that, the talk shows, advertisements that went on forever, overwrought patriotism, or crap that couldn't even be called music."

"Or putting in a holo at a red light."

"Unless you were on the highway, in which case you'd better hope you had a passenger. Or suffer quietly with your own thoughts."

"I _hated_ highways. So did Nora. But, you know, she had a baby, so guess who got to drive on them all the time." Nate turned his head further into Nick's shoulder, sighed and slumped against him. "You're right. I should go to bed."

"Preferably before you fall asleep right there."

"Mm. But it's comfortable here."

"You'd rather sleep on an old robot's shoulder than on a bed? You sure you're feeling okay?"

"Not just _any_ old robot's shoulder, no." The words were mumbled, and Nate sure wasn't pulling away. The weight of his head, the warmth of his body against Nick's arm was pleasant, and if they'd been anywhere else – an old abandoned building, say, or under a crumbling bridge, or resting against a hill – Nick probably would have let him be, let himself enjoy having a bit of human contact.

He glanced around the room and saw a synth – not one of the ones that went around cleaning all the time, and not dressed like a Courser, but still setting off his instincts – looking at them. Nick let his eyes slide carefully off to someone else. " _Nate_ ," he murmured.

"Okay, okay." He groaned as he sat up straight, then rolled his neck in a way that made a horrendous cracking noise. "Okay, time for bed it is." He glanced at his Pip-Boy. "Even if it is two in the afternoon. I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"

He did not, as it turned out, see him tomorrow. Nick spent the whole day being made to take various kinds of intelligence and personality tests, since someone had dug up old Nick's results and wanted to compare. "Fascinating," said the girl – she couldn't have been out of her teens yet – who administered the tests, as she checked over one set of results.

"What?"

She glanced up at him and brushed an errant curl of hair behind her ear. "Your vocabulary is very nearly the same size as it was pre-War – within margin of error – even though you must not have much opportunity to use it to its fullest extent. You must have an excellent memory."

"What do you mean, opportunity to use it?"

"Oh, um, well, I mean, you've been living on the surface, haven't you? So it's not like you can read books or talk with educated people or scientists like you might have before."

"I'll admit, culture's gone downhill a bit since the pre-War era, but it's not quite that dire. I know of at least two schools and four libraries in the Commonwealth."

She perked up a bit. "Wow, really?"

"And trust me, there are still scientists who can talk rings around me – you should talk to the nice couple of ladies who run the lab in Diamond City – and there was that crackpot who thought Shakespeare was going to revolutionize society..." She dropped her pen and leaned forward across the table as he spoke. "And trust me, even if a farmer doesn't know any fancy words, doesn't mean they're stupid. Takes a lot to grow vegetables year after year, especially nowadays, or manage a herd of Brahmin. Cows," he clarified at her confused look. "But with two heads, and a hell of a tendency to wander off if they're not supervised."

She listened to him for quite a while, asking questions, until she must have realized how off-track they had gotten and picked up a sheet of paper with a regretful expression. "Guess we should get back to these," she said, looking at a printout with more of those pattern-matching questions.

"Sure," he said, considering her. "Let me know when you need a break again." She blinked at him, nodded, then slid over the first sheet.

She showed him the results afterward. The old Nick Valentine had been pretty smart, but at least when it came to finding patterns in grids of images, Nick had him beat. "Actually, not only did you do better than, um, the human Mr. Valentine, this is much higher than average for our gen 3's, even our Coursers," she said, circling things with her pen. "Which is frankly amazing. I don't suppose you have any insights? I don't know how much you know about your own neural architecture..."

Hoo, boy, it was a good thing none of her supervisors were around to hear her ask questions like _that_ , or to see her give him that hopeful look. "Can't say it feels much different than before. Although, you know, are you sure about how valid old Nick's results are? He wasn't in the best place when they... my – his – uh, his fiance had just been killed. I'm no expert, but I've seen what grief can do to a man."

"Gosh," she said, her eyes wide. "I had no idea. That's actually a really good point." She noted it down, then glanced up at him. "And you remember that happening? So, like, does it feel like your own memories?"

"Exactly the same, just as real." Painfully so, no matter how many times he reminded himself that they belonged to a different man.

"Wow," she said.

He wasn't surprised when she was pulled off the project a couple of days later – she wasn't the first to 'forget' to treat him like a synth, not a person. Her replacement looked even younger, and didn't ask him any extra questions at all.

~!~

Nick stood idly by a testing chamber after yet another experiment – they'd decided that they wanted to see how good he was at hitting targets (with a very much nonlethal weapon, of course) – wishing he had a cigarette. His fingers itched for something to do, and in frustration, he had already taken apart the dinky laser gun they'd given him and put it back together again... after tweaking the focus of the crystals a bit to make it more exciting.

Then the lights went out.

The chatter outside the door abruptly ceased as the low emergency lights flickered on. Nick could hear the electronic locks on the door _click_ off. Hm.

Their supervisor came in only a minute later, Nate in tow. "We're not sure what the problem is, but there's been a total power cut to this entire level," she said. "We have people looking into it, but it might me a while. We need to conserve the emergency power for things that really cannot be interrupted, so we're asking everyone to vacate the level until we figure out the problem. Take an early lunch, perhaps?" There was a chorus of sighs and groans. "Yes, I know, everyone hates to have their work disturbed. I promise, Maintenance is on it. Come on, grab some backups and go talk to your colleagues for a couple of hours."

She left, leaving the scientists to grumble as they collected what they could. Nate wandered around, offering help with picking up papers, asking after everyone, his sentences quiet and short. Nick watched him, aware of nervous glances being sent his way by others in the room, but Nate only sent him calm looks, maybe with a hint of a smile.

"There's no point in leaving him here, right?" he asked a programmer.

"Uh, no, but the doors aren't designed to..." He fell silent as Nick pinned the laser under his arm, hooked his metal fingers in the shallow grooves of the door, tried to find a place to grip with his good hand, and started to pry it open. It wasn't that hard, once he got them separated enough to stick his fingers through for leverage.

"Hey," Nate said quietly when he slid out. He helped the programmer stack the last of his backup holos in a bag, then lagged behind the grumbling scientists as they started to exit. "You okay?"

"Fine, yeah. And you?"

"Good." The reply was soft, and Nate wasn't looking toward him, or toward the door, just somewhere on the wall.

They followed the scientists out into the hall, where there was a commotion as the programmer's bag ripped or fell open, or something like that, and the holos spilled across the floor. Several people converged to help pick them up, but Nick could read a cue like that and followed Nate down a different corridor.

"This way. There's an old access tunnel from way back. We're gonna use it, and. Uh, even if we don't get out it will be okay."

"Yeah? Little short on the details, Nate. Again."

"Sorry. Didn't get any sleep before this. We're going to—"

He shut up as they turned a corner and saw a synth, one of the old ones that were only used as slaves for cleaning and maintenance. The synth look in their direction and said in a staticky voice, "Please evacuate the area. Power will be restored shortly."

Nate took too long to answer, so Nick did so for him. "Gotta fetch something down here real quick. Order from the Director himself, right, Nate?"

"Oh. Yeah. We'll be out soon."

"Understood." The synth went back to its slow walk down the hall. Nate wrapped fingers tightly around his arm and pulled him in the opposite direction, and didn't let go until they were several corridors down, when they ran into more synths – another gen 1, and a gen 3.

"Sir?" The gen 3 tilted his head, eyes wide. The gen 1 went still. "What you doing down here? You should evacuate until we have found the cause of the power issue."

"We won't be long," said Nate. He smiled, but it came off more like a grimace. Good thing it was dark. "Just need to get something."

The synth's gaze drifted back and forth between them, and when he spoke, his voice was hesitant. "What is it? I can get it."

"Don't trouble yourself," Nick said. "You've got a job to do, don't you?"

"Authorization requested," the gen 1 demanded, although its voice box was so damaged that it took Nick a few seconds to put together what it had said.

"Um," said Nate.

"I don't think they need authorization," the other synth said. "It's Father's uncle and... actually, I'm not sure what you're doing here."

"Helping him out," Nick said, just as the gen 1 demanded authorization again. Nate looked lost. The gen 3 looked between them again and took a step back, then another.

"Authorization not given. Engaging hostile target."

"What—"

Nick shoved Nate out of the way of the charging synth and spun on his heel. He lined up the shot with the laser, and while it was weak, when he got off four good hits in succession, its leg collapsed. Still, it tried to drag itself back to them with its hands and the working leg. It was a pitiable sight, but they didn't have time to feel sorry for gen 1s with broken programming; Nick aimed for the head and watched its lights flicker out.

There was still the gen 3; he turned again to find Nate had pulled a weapon out, but wasn't aiming. He was frowning at the gen 3, who had thrown himself into a corner and was covering his head.

"Hey, um." He lowered his plasma pistol and took a step forward. Ah, Nate and his soft heart. As refreshing of a sight as it was, they probably didn't have the time for this.

"Nate."

"Just a second. I promise. Hey, we're not going to hurt you, okay?" He crouched down several steps from the cowering synth. "Look, we have to get going. But if you don't like it here. The Railroad, or the Minutemen, they're both good people. They'd help you. Okay?"

He didn't respond. Nate sighed as he stood.

"Which way?"

"Over here. It's not much further."

As they got further in, the emergency lights were shut off altogether. Nate lit his Pip-Boy and kept going, down narrow halls and through abandoned rooms that had been stripped of everything useful.

"Almost there. It's just through here."

"Do all this yourself? No wonder you haven't been sleeping."

"I had some help," Nate admitted. "I told you there were sympathetic people down here. Even if Shaun's not one of them. There's this guy whose wife is a synth, you remember. And there were others. Like this girl that told me about the way out if I promised to give her a place to stay at a settlement or help her get to Diamond city, she wanted to know more about the surface. Kept asking questions. I don't know if you saw much of people like them, they probably tried to keep them away from you, but. What they were doing to you, it wasn't just me who was bothered. It hit a nerve with others, too. As long as I didn't ask too much..."

"Nice to know that there's a few decent people down here, at least."

"I think." Nate paused, chewed his lip. "I think it's more than 'a few'. But they're also... being a good person is harder when the good people aren't in charge. You ever have Chinese friends before the war?"

"Yeah. I remember." Chinese clients had started showing up at his agency at odd hours, afraid to come during normal ones. A nice woman he'd dated in school had been sent to a camp, and soon stopped replying to his letters. The Yunnan food place he had liked had been lucky enough to stay open, but its windows were broken three times, and soon it was rare to see anyone who wasn't Chinese in the place. "Doesn't make a good excuse."

"I'm not saying it is." Nate sighed and stopped at a door, opening it to reveal an old storage room, with a terminal situated by another door on the other side. "Can we talk about this later?"

"No rush. Want me to take care of the lock?"

"I can do it." He pressed the button to turn it on, and while they waited for the ancient thing to boot up, started to rifle through his bag. "Hey, I've got a present for you. I'll hack the terminal, you put it on." Nate pulled something – no, a couple of somethings – out and shoved them at Nick, then turned to the terminal and started working through its security.

The first something was a very familiar hat. Nick shook it out and put it on, then let the other something unfurl toward the floor. "You really shouldn't have," he said, staring at his coat. There it was, patches and strange stains he couldn't remember the origins of and all. Of all the stupid things to...

"What's the detective without his trench coat?" Nate asked. "Oh, goddammit. What – seriously? Who the hell makes their password _password_ in this day and age?"

Nick snorted as he pulled the coat on over the Institute jumpsuit. He felt more like himself than he had in weeks, and though his coolant was pumping at a normal rate, he could have sworn he was warmer than usual. Him and Nate on yet another crazy adventure spurred by Nate's awful luck. "You got it?"

"Yep." The doors hissed open. They paused only to lock them again from the other side, then hurried forward down the passage, with only the light from Nate's Pip-Boy to guide their way.

"Do you know where we're going?"

"Only generally. We need to head north-ish, which is that way, but..." North was a wall where the hallway ended; there were two corridors they could take, one to the north-east and one to the west. "Right, then?"

They had to backtrack more than once, as they ended up in some dead-end room or unfinished hallway that turned into nothing but solid stone. It was dead silent down here, even after Nick turned his hearing all the way up, until he could make out not only every creak of his own joints, but Nate's breath, his heartbeat, the sound of him swallowing. Not being able to hear anything else was seriously creeping him out. This kind of quiet wasn't natural.

It was so quiet that at first he thought he was imagining things when he heard a soft, soft scraping from somewhere behind them, but no: it only got louder. "Nate," he whispered. "Got company."

He fumbled with his Pip-Boy, plunging them into almost complete darkness. "How far?"

"Hard to tell."

They were in a long, narrow corridor with no rooms coming off of it. There was nowhere to go but forward. Even that was a difficult task when they couldn't see. Nate bit off a curse as he tripped over the uneven surface, and Nick caught him only by sheer luck.

"... _up ahead_ ," he heard.

" _Nate_."

"Okay, okay." He switched the light back on and they gave up any pretense of silence, breaking into a sprint. It wasn't unnoticed by the people behind them; Nate could probably hear them shouting now, too.

They took a hairpin curve and nearly ran into each other. Solid stone, except for a tunnel that went straight up to who knew where. No way to climb it, and no way out but back. Damn it.

Nate stared upward, panting, even as their pursuers were getting close. "Nate," he started to say, not sure what words were going to come next – it had been nice being partners, tell Ellie that she can have the Agency, hope Curie appreciated those typing lessons, thanks for being...

"Okay, okay," Nate was mumbling. He turned his head toward Nick, and his eyes were incredibly wide, but he didn't look scared. "It's going to be okay, Nick."

"You keep saying that." He lifted the laser and moved between Nate and the entrance to the room; seconds later, the first synth came around the bend. That one didn't shoot, however, didn't raise his own plasma rifle. There came a second synth, a third, and then—

"Uncle, I demand an explanation."

"I don't think you need one, Shaun."

"We gave you everything you needed, we didn't harm this unit you're so attached to, I thought we had finally made some progress in your understanding of how the Institute works—"

"I _understand_ , sure—"

"And yet here you are, stealing valuable Institute property, ruining our experiments, sabotaging our power—"

" _Nick isn't Institute property!_ "

Nick jumped. He hadn't know Nate could scream like that. He was breathing hard, trembling. Nick stepped closer to him.

"And sure, now I know," he continued, the words rolling right out of him. "I know that there's a lot more you guys are doing – growing better food, better, better water purifiers – but you can't even exist without stealing power, except for, some nuclear generator you haven't even built yet, oh my god, did you not learn anything from our screw-ups, or do you think you can make the tech happen when all the scientists before the war – there were thousands of them working on – when they couldn't do it. You, you make synths and you make synths and _you make synths_ when you don't even need so many—"

"Uncle, please calm down," Shaun said, coming forward, hands held up. Nick hated to agree with him, but... Nate shouldn't be breathing like that, and it was never a good sign when his words started to roll on and on like that.

" _And you guys aren't even good scientists_ ," Nate snapped, his face going more than a little wild now. Nick blinked. Shaun looked quite taken aback.

When Nate didn't explain, Nick said, "Might want to run that one by him again, Nate. With diagrams."

"Scientists aren't supposed to, to ignore things because they don't fit their theories. Yet. Here you all are with the hypothesis that 'synths aren't sentient' or 'synths aren't real people' or whatever it is. And you ignore any evidence that they are. And Shaun. You think 'the wasteland is impossible to work with' and 'the wasteland is worthless' and. Unless you're really just on a power trip like – like some people think – unless you really are then you're ignoring _so much_."

Shaun's mouth twisted. "Uncle," he said, in that sort of 'I am patiently explaining obvious facts to you' voice. "We've tried—"

"What, once? You had _one_ bad experience working with other groups and gave up? Hell, the US government gave _China_ more chances than that and we _hated_ them, you can't even imagine – and you know. I thought it was terrible when I came out. People shot at me. People were just getting by. I'm not – it's not pretty. But it could be so much better if you actually helped anyone. Instead you're just locking yourselves in a white cage. There are people who deserve it. A lot of people."

"Uncle, we've had this discussion again and again and _again_. I've explained our reasons to you a dozen times. Perhaps you're right that we haven't listened to you, but you certainly don't seem to be listening to us."

Shaun kept going on, but Nick tuned out of the rising argument in favor of something else he could hear. It was faint, a very high pitch – outside of human hearing, if he remembered his frequencies correctly. One of the synths with Shaun cocked his head, then turned it like he was trying to triangulate where it was coming from. It was so quiet, though, that Nick wasn't having any more luck.

Then, in less than second the faint whine became a loud screech, and the world exploded into white.

It felt like an electric shock without the pain – gone again a moment later, leaving Nick with the urge to blink afterimages that didn't exist out of his eyes. Beside him, Nate listed; Nick grabbed his arm and grunted as Nate almost collapsed on him. They weren't in the Institute any more – they were outside, familiar voices ringing out in a loud commotion all around them.

"Oh my god," and "Holy shit, is that—" and "Oh, geez, I didn't mean to—" and "Monsieur Valentine! You are well, I hope? And what of... oh, dear," and "Sir! Mister Valentine! And – goodness, is that... Shaun?"

"Okay, people, quiet down," Garvey shouted. "Let's give the General a moment." He was holding his rifle at the ready, though, his eyes fixed on the third figure a few feet away from Nick and Nate, who was sprawled out on his side.

Nick tightened his grip on Nate and took them back a few steps, turned to put himself between the still-dazed Nate and Shaun.

Garvey started to approach, but it was Codsworth that first swooped forward. "Shaun, is that really you?" he asked, getting very close.

Shaun stared. "What?"

"Oh, I don't suppose you remember me any longer, you were so young... but my goodness, look at how you've grown! Mum would be so happy to see you if she were still... In any case, have you come to visit with your uncle? I've heard that you haven't been getting along very well with him, which is such a shame – he tried very hard to find you, you know – but that's nothing some quality family time can't fix!"

Shaun opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Then he turned toward Garvey. "What the hell is going on? Why have you kidnapped me?" he demanded.

Nick didn't hear what Garvey had to say, however; Nate had drawn his attention by suddenly collapsing against him, laughing so hard he wasn't making any sound.

~!~

It turned out that the transporter wasn't going to be up for a return trip. After Shaun had been locked in somewhere, and extra guards posted – nobody knew when the Institute was going to come for their Director – Garvey showed up just as the rest of them were getting caught caught up.

"I have the ASCII code table memorized," Nate said as he explained how they'd gotten out, his grin sheepish. "Or at least the letters and numbers and a couple other useful ones. Don't ask me why, I got into some stupid projects when I was younger. Anyway. I found out where they were broadcasting the classical station from. They had more equipment, no microphones, but I turned into one of the Minutemen frequencies, started doing dit dit dot. I don't know Morse code except SOS but I thought Curie would crack it."

She beamed. "It was not so difficult once I figured out the pattern. Not very efficient... but it got the messages across."

"Yeah, so. I began sending out messages, a few letters at a time. Basically, 'The Institute has us, send help.' Then some more advanced ones. We made it work. I thought about going in person, but they wanted me to have a Courser to 'guard' me and they've got spies and... hell, did you know Carla was an informant? Basically every traveling merchant in the Commonwealth is. Anyway. I was worried about Nick."

"Who wouldn't be?" Garvey nudged him in the shoulder. "They didn't mess with anything up there, did they?"

"Far as I can tell. They sure poked around, though. You should have heard them talk about how _amazing_ and _efficient_ my programming is."

"Ouch."

"I am very glad to hear that both Sir and Mister Valentine are unharmed," said Codsworth, going around the circle to collect glasses and dispense new drinks. "But what on Earth are we going to do with poor Shaun?"

"We can't return him until Sturges fixes up the teleporter," said Garvey, "but he says that could take a day, maybe two. Thing got pretty fried, from what I heard him say."

"Curie and I could take a look to see if we could help," Nate said. He paused to rub his forehead and added, "After I get some shut-eye. The Institute gave me a nice room, but I never did figure out how to turn the lights out, and _everything_ is white down there."

"I will go get started with assisting Mr. Sturges right now," volunteered Curie, and with a happy little hum she jumped from her chair and was out the door.

Nick was ready to make his excuses with the others – somebody around here had to have a smoke, and more comfortable clothes to wear under his coat than the Institute suit – but Nate's hand on his wrist stopped him. "What is it?" he asked as the others shuffled out of the house.

"Could you, um. Could you come talk with me while I try to fall asleep again? My brain's buzzing all over the place. Even though I'm really tired. You don't have to, I'm sure you've got lots to think about too."

"Sure. It's not a problem, Nate."

"Okay. Thanks."

He turned off the lights as Nate got ready to sleep, noted that the latch on the front door needed fixing, it kept coming open – he toed a piece of broken cement against it for now, until Nate got around to it. Nate was under the covers when he came into the bedroom – promising – but was laying on his back, staring straight at the ceiling, even though he always slept on his side.

"Something you need to get?" Nick asked gently, sitting on the edge of the bed.

"There's so much, how would I even..." He pressed his hands to his eyes, breathed in and out, deep. "They really didn't do anything to you?"

"It wasn't the most pleasant experience in the world, and I'd prefer to avoid having it happen again, but they didn't dare touch was what going on up here before they knew what it was doing. I'm not sure how far they even got on understanding my code."

"Yeah, uh, neural nets, huh. Complicated stuff."

"So you can stop worrying. I'm not going anywhere, not if I can help it."

"Right." Nate rubbed his eyes, then let his hands fall and curl somewhere under the blanket with a long sigh. He met Nick's eyes again and smiled. "I'm gonna say something weird."

"Yeah?"

"Your eyes are real pretty."

Nick blinked and made an aborted attempt to reach up and touch them. "These things? Pretty? You sure that nutritional paste you were eating didn't have anything in it?"

"I mean it," said Nate. "When we were in the dark, and I couldn't see anything else, I... it was kind of soothing. I don't know the right word for it. It just made me think, oh, Nick's here, couldn't be anyone else, and it made me real glad."

People had shot at him when they saw his eyes in the dark, or else backed up, terrified. Even Ellie had jumped to see him in the dark, more than once. "If anyone's got pretty eyes here, it's you with those baby blues."

"Aw, Nick." Nate laughed, abrupt but much more cheerful than his fit earlier. "You don't have to return the compliment, you know."

"I don't? I thought that's how it went. The girl says you're so tall and handsome, you say she's got beautiful eyes and _what_ did she do to her hair today..." _I tried a new style,_ said Jenny, _took me a whole hour, but I wanted to look nice when we haven't see each other in so long_ , and Nick shook his head to try and banish the memory.

"Nick?"

"Nothing. You ready to go to sleep?"

"Another memory? Your eyes did the thing." Nate went quiet. After a minute or two, he reached out and curled his fingers around Nick's wrist. The closer one, the metal one. "I'm going to go talk to Shaun again tomorrow. Not expecting anything. More... good-bye, if it has to be one. I... you don't have to, but. I'd like it if you would come with."

"You sure that's a good idea?"

"Only if you want to," Nate said. "I think I'm going to take Codsworth along, too. I... you're really important to me, and I know I can't make him see that, I know I can't make him see _sense_ , but I'm going to show him one more time. And then if I never see him again..." His grip tightened. "Then, okay. I tried." Nick played that over again in his mind, _you're really important to me_ , and maybe his mechanical heart didn't beat any faster, but it felt like it should. "Nick?" Fingers brushed against the edge of his jaw. "You've got this look on your face."

He reached up with his free hand to pull Nate's away. "That's a nice thing to say about an old—"

Nate scowled at sat up, twisting his hand in Nick's so that he was holding on to both of them now. "You always do that. Why do you always do that? Sure, I guess you've seen better days, so's half the Commonwealth. Haven't Ellie and I and everyone gotten it through your skull yet that we don't care? Hell, Nick, I consider _Codsworth_ to be the only member of my family left. ...I guess Shaun doesn't count anymore. Anyway. Do I have to give you the 'you're your very own person' speech _again_?"

Nick couldn't help laughing. "You're really not giving up on that idea, are you?"

"Well, it's true. Do I really have to show you?"

He glanced down at his hands, tightly held by Nate's, and was struck by another memory for a split second: Jenny, her hair falling loose around her face, worrying after him, leaning in.

Which Nate seemed to be doing, too, which wasn't helping the double vision feeling.

"You're a fool, you know that?" It came out softer and fonder than he'd perhaps intended.

"Yeah? That's not a no. Nick, let me?"

Their lips just barely brushed. Nate didn't seem to be sure of what he was doing, and Nick – well, it had been a long time. It felt different, in this body. Not bad, though.

"You keep this up, your whole family's gonna be nothing but robots."

Nate snorted and leaned their foreheads together, his grip on Nick's hands gentling. "There are worse fates. Some of my best friends are robots." He laughed at his own joke, his breath warm against Nick's cheek.

"Okay, definitely past time for you to go to sleep. C'mon, lie down." Nate pulled a face, but did so, curling up on his side.

"Tomorrow?"

"I'll come with you. Don't think it'll help, but if you want me to, it's the least I can do to repay you for pulling me out of there."

"And afterward, let's doing something outside. I don't care what. Maybe pick some flower for my sister-in-law. See if we can forage anything. Maybe just read some books? You can pick."

"It's a date. Now. _Sleep_."

"Okay, okay."

He shut his eyes and found himself a comfortable place under the covers. Nick scooted up against the headboard, Nate's hand still around his wrist, and watched him slowly, slowly, fall asleep.


End file.
